It suffices to say that Donald Trump has been all over the place on health care reform. Last month, at the first Republican presidential debate, Trump argued that socialized medicine in Scotland “works incredibly well.” At the same time, Trump has said that Obamacare has “gotta go” and that he would “repeal and replace [it] something terrific.” But Trump has been light on details. Last night, on 60 Minutes, Trump elaborated on what his plan would look like.

Trump: ‘I am going to take care of everybody’

CBS’ Scott Pelley conducted the interview. “What’s your plan for Obamacare?” Pelley asked Trump. “Obamacare’s going to be repealed and replaced,” said Trump. “Obamacare is a disaster if you look at what’s going on with premiums where they’re up 40, 50, 55 percent.” Pelley followed up:

Pelley: How do you fix it?

Trump: There's many different ways, by the way. Everybody's got to be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say because a lot of times they say, "No, no, the lower 25 percent that can't afford private. But--"

Pelley: Universal health care.

Trump: I am going to take care of everybody. I don't care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody's going to be taken care of much better than they're taken care of now.

Pelley: The uninsured person is going to be taken care of. How? How?

Trump: They're going to be taken care of. I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people. And, you know what, if this is probably—

Pelley: Make a deal? Who pays for it?

Trump: —the government's gonna pay for it. But we're going to save so much money on the other side. But for the most it's going to be a private plan and people are going to be able to go out and negotiate great plans with lots of different competition with lots of competitors with great companies and they can have their doctors, they can have plans, they can have everything.

Like much of what Trump says, his “plan” to replace Obamacare is a combination of superficially attractive principles and mysterious underlying policy.

I’ve written for years about the fact that we could achieve universal health coverage while dramatically reducing the size and scope of government health care. This is because we waste trillions of dollars in America subsidizing health care in profoundly inefficient ways.

So Trump is right that we could repeal Obamacare and replace it with “something terrific” that ensured that every American who wanted it could afford health coverage. Kudos to him for embracing that principle. But Trump’s “plan,” such as it is, doesn’t appear to curtail government intervention. In fact, it likely could only work with price controls, tax hikes, or a massive increase in the deficit.

Of those three approaches, Trump appears to favor price controls. He says that “the government’s gonna pay” for his universal coverage plan “but we’re going to save so much money on the other side.” The only way to “save so much money on the other side” is if the government regulates what hospitals and doctors can charge—as single-payer health systems do—or if Trump helps establish private insurance monopolies that, in effect, administer price controls on behalf of the government.

As Trump puts it, “I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people.” The intuitively obvious type of deal that a President Trump could make would be to say, “we’re going to make sure every American has health insurance, so long as you accept lower fees in return for the extra business.” It’s not clear how Americans will be able to “have their doctors” if doctors decide they won’t accept Donaldcare’s prices.

Show us the details, Donald

It’ll be interesting to see if Trump actually puts out a detailed policy proposal on health care reform. He has done so with regards to immigration, but little else. If you had told me six months ago that an advocate of socialized medicine would be leading the Republican primary, I would have tried to sell you a bridge. But Trump has defied expectations in that way and so many others.

I am Forbes' Policy Editor, and president of a non-partisan think tank, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP.org), which develops policy reform ideas to expand economic opportunity to those who least have it. I'm ...